Selective education should be reintroduced to ease growing anger at the lack of social mobility in Britain, Boris Johnson suggested last night.

In his most pointed political intervention for years, the London mayor indicated that a successor to grammar schools could be created to promote “academic competition between pupils” and tackle growing inequality.

He also risked controversy by suggesting that it was impossible to create total equality because people were “already very far from equal in raw ability”.

“Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many